Young techie finds "kill switch" for cyberattack

A young cybersecurity researcher has been credited with helping to halt the spread of the global ransomware cyberattack by accidentally activating a so-called "kill switch" in the malicious software.

The Guardian newspaper reported Saturday that the 22-year-old Britain-based researcher, identified online only as MalwareTech, found that the software's spread could be stopped by registering a garbled domain name.

The paper quoted the researcher as saying: "This is not over. The attackers will realize how we stooped it, they'll change the code and then they'll start again."

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